You’ll get results, groups that have to do with your topic, and are composed of English-speaking Professionals. Scroll down, look for groups that sound interesting and have a lot of members. The name of the group is a link, you can click for more info on the group.

If you find one that sounds like a good fit for you, join and read some of the posts.

If you don’t find one that fits, you can pick the best of the lot and there’s a link on the right: Similar groups Click that for a new search for similar groups.

Repeat the above process until you find something good – on topic, lots of English-speaking Professionals are members, posting your article is appropriate given the group’s content and guidelines.

Post there. Make sure all your contact info is in your signature for every post (see my signature on this post).

Don’t post the same article to multiple groups but, since these are a new audience, feel free to re-cycle past emails and other writings.

You’ll get emails advising you of comments on your posts.

Respond to comments but not to spam.

Spam can look like flattery but if you examine the comment, there is no evidence that this person (or bot) actually read and understood your post. Anything along the lines of “Your writing is so sublime and exceedingly valuable that I will check daily for more” is auto-suck-up spam. LinkedIn does pretty well in policing spam.

Ultimately, once you’re rolling as a group member on LinkedIn, you’ll want to start your own group, thus further establishing yourself as an Opinion Leader, the authority people listen to, in your chosen field.

Participating in forums, such as LinkedIn Groups, should be less than than a couple of hours per week. LinkedIn is growing rapidly and LinkedIn is all about working people, entrepreneurs and job seekers, not 13 year old girls reporting on what Melissa said to Buffy about Caitlin.

Like “Pinky and the Brain”, pretty much all of my internet advice is directed at total world domination.

It is a great pleasure to present Special Guest Blogger Bruce Wiseman, [email protected] author and Master Marketer. Visit Bruce’s company website at http://www.ontargetresearch.com for more information on the benefits available for your company with correct use of the technology of Marketing and Positioning.

$5 Down And $.75 A Week by Bruce Wiseman

When my father was a young man, he stowed away on a tramp steamer to Hawaii.

He was a tough little guy who had boxed in his youth and had the nose to prove it. But he also had the gift of the pitch. And once in the land of many Alohas, he traveled door-to-door selling the hot, new vacuum-tube Philco radios to the islanders. It was the beginning of broadcasting’s Golden Age, and he did well.

When he returned stateside he opened an appliance store in Berkeley and the rest, as they say….

Well…perhaps not quite history, but the store in Berkeley was the first of what became an extremely successful chain of home furnishing stores throughout the San Francisco East Bay Area in the 40s, 50s,and 60s.

No pay-per-click budgets to monitor, no social media to maintain, no websites to optimize. “Traffic” was driven into the store by traditional media where you could engage the prospects in conversation and sell them.

In the early days, he used print exclusively; later, he added radio and a bit of television.

He was a master at negotiating great pricing from the manufacturers, which he passed along to his customers, but if there was a single key to his success, it was heavy promotion.

He was the Cal Worthington of the Bay Area Home Furnishing world. It may not have been the most sophisticated position, but it worked.

My dad and the WISEMAN’S brand are long gone. So imagine my surprise when my youngest daughter, in a self-motivated journey into our family’s genealogy, stumbled across her grandfather’s earliest ads promoting the opening of his first store, and sent them to me.

Here is an historically interesting look at one of the San Francisco Bay Area’s more successful merchandisers (he was Northern California’s most successful Frigidiare dealer in the mid twentieth century.)

The ads themselves aren’t particularly unique, but note the financing terms! Even in 1940, $.75 a week had to attract interest. Selling “terms” was another of his successful actions.

But put a bib on before scrolling much further so you when you drool at the prices, it doesn’t get on your shirt or blouse.

There is more about one of the most successful new marketing actions below the pictures, but take a scroll through the advertising of 70 years ago and then pick up the narrative below.

Some things have changed.

Yes, merchants still advertise in newspapers, but traditional advertising revenue has been falling like the President’s poll numbers. Ad revenue has fallen 48% since 2006. Some of the country’s most preeminent newspapers have gone under, while even the venerable New York Times recently announced staff reductions due to “a deteriorating advertising climate”.

Meanwhile, online advertising continues to soar because that is where the public shops today. E-commerce is projected to have reached $680 billion in 2011, an increase of 18.9% over 2010. No surprise then that Internet advertising amounted to $26.04 billion in 2010 making it the second largest advertising channel behind television at $28 billion, but surpassing newspapers at $22 billion.

If you’re in business, if you sell a product or service, you had better have a website.

But, of course, a website isn’t enough. You have to get the shoppers to your site. You can promote your website address, of course, and should. But consider the following information from www.slumdogmarketer.com:

97 % of American Internet users use the Internet to shop (NPD Group).

And, 63% of consumers turn to the Internet first for information about local companies.

But here is the critical fact: according to a study by Webvisible.com and Nielson Online, 82% use search engines to find what they are looking for (Google has 64% of the search engine traffic, Yahoo has 18% and Microsoft’s Bing has 12%).

Which raises the question: are your ad dollars properly allocated?

The Webvisible/Nielson study also found that the top sources for local information by shoppers were:

The story is told in some detail by an inadvertent leak of a massive amount of keyword search data by AOL (AOL uses Google search). The leak involved 20 million key-words searched by 650,000 users over a period of three months. The leak was in 2006, but remains revealing.

If you want to know how important the ranking of your website is on a search engine page take a look:

If your are in the #1 position on the page you get 42.1% of the clicks.

#2 position, 11.9% of the clicks — 3.5x less than #1

#3 position, 8.5% of the clicks — 4.9x less than #1

#4 position, 6.1% of the clicks — 6.9x less than #1

#5 position, 4.9% of the clicks — 8.5x less than #1

#6 position, 4.1% of the clicks — 10.4x less than #1

#7 position, 3.4% of the clicks — 12.3x less than #1

#8 position, 3% of the clicks — 14x less than #1

#9 position, 2.85% of the clicks — 14.8x less than #1

(The leaked data is widely available on the Internet. This math courtesy of Netmark.com.)

Which in turn leads me to share a success with you that will blow you mind.

A friend of mine in New York named Tom Jacoby, does search engine optimization. But he has developed a unique methodology that drives your website up the search engine pages like a heat- seeking missile.

I know, this sounds like a commercial, but bear with me, this is startling.

He ties your product or service to a location:

Sandals, Honolulu

Pawn Shop, Las Vegas

Vegan Market, Berkeley

Tires, Daytona

Organic Dog Food, Santa Monica

Cosmetic Surgery, Beverly Hills

You get seven zip codes or cities and seven key words. So, for example, a beauty saloon in Burbank could have

Beauty Saloon Burbank

Hair Coloring Burbank

Hair and Make-Up Burbank

Pedicure Burbank

Hair Extentions Burbank

Highlights and Coloring Burbank

Hair Pieces and Wigs Burbank

Then, in addition, they would get these same seven key-words in six other jurisdictions, say, for example: Toluca Lake, Universal City, Sunland, Glendale, Hollywood, North Hollywood. Seven cities, seven key-words.

And boy does it work.

An On Target client, to whom we referred Tom earlier in the year, has had a handsome affluence running for months, attributable in part to this service.

But let me get personal. One might think that this would only work for a local business. Not so. I engaged the service for On Target Research some months ago. We aren’t local; our clients are all over the United States. So I picked 7 key cities and 7 key words and turned Tom loose.

One of the survey services that large corporate clients often seek is Customer Loyalty Surveys. This was one of the key words I used in seven major cities across the country.

The result?

If you put “Customer Loyalty Surveys Los Angeles” into Google, you will see that we are number one on the list. We are also number one for “Customer Loyalty Surveys New York”. Number two on the list for Chicago.

Did this help our sales? On Target has just had its best year in over a decade.

Referrals (word of mouth) is the most hassle-free inexpensive form of advertising. Always has been and likely always will be.

So why bother to promote if you get referrals for most of your business?

It’s the chicken and the egg conundrum. Which comes first? You have to maintain enough traffic coming into your business to achieve the desired level of quality (by having proper staff and materials) to keep expanding. Otherwise the referrals dry up. The idea is to keep clients or customers coming in from every possible source, not just one source.

In the 21st century what do most of your “referrals” do when making the decision to see you or use your service or business? Answer: They Google your service and compare! I am willing to bet that if you asked every customer or client you have if they searched your product or service on the internet before arriving to you over 60% will say yes, whether they had you as a referral or not.

If 85% of your customers come from referrals and 15% come from other sources of advertising how does that compare with your profit margin? If your profit margin is within the 10% to 20% range (a usual amount for small to mid-range business) then the customers you get from advertising could represent a portion of that amount which puts you above the level of make-break.

It is all about return on investment. Sometimes the return on investment is not as apparent as we would like it to be. A simple question to your customers of “how did you hear about us” does not necessarily tell the whole story. An additional question “did you search our service on the internet (not just our website)” will give you more information.

There are many ways to determine if your investment in advertising is yielding you the return you want. With internet marketing you can use programs to track the amount of traffic you get from various keyword searches. There is not a foolproof method. In advertising your key is exposure. How much is the word out about your service (the more the better)?

Do all that you can to increase the referrals coming in. They are the best source of new business. Flank it with internet marketing and maintaining an excellent quality of service or product and you will be at the top of the heap, truly NUMBER ONE ON THE LIST.